(Its an interesting discussion, you can fast forward through the music at the beginning if you wish, Ed.)

Toofly + MUCK @ WFMU photo by J&K who you can find @ www.urbanimagephotography.comhttp://www.flickr.com/people/jimandkarlamurray/Jim & Karla Murray's present group show is "The Carlton Arms Art > Project" > 195 Grand Street 2nd floor (between Driggs & Bedford Avenue in > Williamsburg, Brooklyn) > This show will be up until May and includes Jim & Karla Murray's > photography as well as canvases by the artist BANSKY and New York > graffiti artist CERN) > More info at: www.artbreakgallery.com > >

Jim & Karla Murray's upcoming show "Underground/Overground" at the > Artbreak Gallery will have an opening reception on Saturday June 7th > from 5-9PM > Artbreak Gallery is located at 195 Grand Street 2nd floor (between > Driggs & Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn) > It is a collaborative exhibition featuring Jim & Karla Murray's > photography and works by the graffiti artist CERN, the street artist > Billi Kid and photography by Allan Ludwig.

LADY PINK: www.pinksmith.com LADY PINK's present show "Brick Ladies of NYC" is at the AdHoc Art Gallery 49 Bogart Street in East Williamsburg with AIKO is on exhibit through April 20th. More info at www.AdHocArt.org

Special shout out to Dona - the fourth contributor to the Bronx Museum piece along with MUCK, Pink, & Toofly

==============================================

A new exhibit at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, “Making It Together,” celebrates the collaborative efforts of feminist artists from the 1970s and attempts to inspire similar fervor and commitment today.

“Activism is never done,” said Lady Pink, a New York City graffiti artist who collaborated with three other “graffiti girls,” TooFly, Muck and Doña, on a mural featured in the exhibit. “There’s always injustice.”

The mural, titled “Activism is Never Over,” depicts activist women such as Elvira Arellano, a Mexican immigrant who founded United Latino Family (a group that lobbies for families at risk of separation because of deportation), and Gloria Steinem, a leading feminist who founded Ms. Magazine in the early 1970s. The painting also pays homage to future activists. A young black girl is featured prominently on the mural in neon green paint, Lady Pink’s optimistic nod to strong young women.

“We’re breeding our daughters to be stronger and tougher,” she said.

Names and facts are painted across the mural as well. “Long Live Benazir Bhutto” is painted in bright green; “150,000 American women die of anorexia each year” is written in large black letters.

The collaboration among the four graffiti artists is in keeping with the theme of the exhibit, in its tribute to feminist artists who used collaborative techniques to produce activist art between 1970 and1985, a time of strength for the feminist movement.Most pieces are from women who worked in Los Angeles or New York, and include videos of theatrical performances, a collage from a protest against sexual violence and issues of “Heresies,” a magazine that was produced by women and featured different views on politics and art.

In the “pink room,” where most of the exhibit is held, guest-curator Carey Lovelace encouraged visitors to think pink.

“Pink was embraced in its full association with femininity,” Lovelace says.

The color features heavily in the main room of the exhibit. One piece, by artist Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, features squares of paper on which various women wrote their thoughts on pink. The responses range from a rejection of the color as being something for “infants” and “old ladies,” to a description of four tubes of rouge, which were all different shades of pink, to a poem chronicling the role of pink in one woman’s life.

The exhibit is unique because it is the first in New York that pays tribute to the innovative art forms created by feminist artists, according to Camille Wanliss, a Bronx Museum spokeswoman.

“It’s something the Bronx has not seen before, but it’s also great for New York City as a whole,” she said.

Visitors to the museum said the exhibit is powerful because of its emphasis on the strength that comes from having a network of strong women.

Leah Coloff, a 42-year-old cellist from Park Slope in Brooklyn, said she feels that the idea of women’s collectives is seen as “quaint” in today’s society, but that she thinks many women would like to have such a network. The work at the exhibit “still resonates for me,” she said. “Some ideas are slipping away and we’re sometimes alienated from each other.”

"that German graffiti movie myself and Toofly were trying to remember name of is called "Pure Hate" and the best scene - where they arrive deep in the night in ninja like fashion ready to descend on a train with their spraycans is here on this YouTube link:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFuUs0VTFsU&feature=related

(Bronx, NY, January 2, 2008) – On Sunday, March 2, 2008, The Bronx Museum of the Arts will open Making It Together: Women’s Collaborative Art and Community. On view through August 4, the exhibition explores an important chapter in recent history when women artists, inspired by the 1970s Feminist Movement, worked collectively in new ways to engage communities and address social issues.

The movement pioneered new approaches to group identity through various means such ascollaborative performances, women’s co-ops, “leaderless” institutions and inclusive artworks engaging communities. Set to coincide with WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, which opens at P.S.1 in February 2008, the exhibition will feature key performances and visual-arts collectives, showcasing innovative examples of activist art created in the 1970s and early 1980s through video and photo documentation as well as various ephemera.

“Today,” remarks Lovelace, “artists are seeking ways to make potent political statements. The women in this exhibition created art works that truly affected the world.”

Among those showcased are Suzanne Lacy and Leslie Labowitz, whose landmark, multi-part event Three Weeks in May (1977), recreated into a large-scale installation, combiningart-related performances and public workshops, was at the forefront of the movement against sexual violence.

Other groups represented include the Guerilla Girls, whose satiric posters challenged art-world gender and racial politics, the Heresies collective, who deployed innovative Feminist approaches to publishing to produce a legendary journal, and Judy Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles, the world’s largest mural, which employed “at risk” youth to research, visually imagine, and paint the “hidden histories” of the California Southland.

A newsprint publication will accompany the exhibition, featuring an essay by Lovelace, co-president emeritus of the U.S. Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics, whohas written essays on topics related to feminist art for Art in America, Artforum, ARTnews,Art on Paper and many other publications. Making It Together marks Lovelace’s debut as a curator.

In addition, as a counterpart to Making It Together, The Bronx Museum will also featureHighlights of the Permanent Collection: Women Artists, a special exhibition from itspermanent collection highlighting women artists whose works comment on social andpolitical situations. Artists include Tania Bruguera, Ana Mendieta, Adrian Piper, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Graciela Sacco, Gary Simmons and Rachel Lachowicz, and Carrie Mae Weems.

27 April, 2008

The Yale Daily News reports that Aliza Shvarts is disputing Yale's announcement that her entire project is a "creative fiction."

.The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman.s body,. Yale spokeswoman Helaine Klasky said in a written statement e-mailed to the News this afternoon.

But Shvarts stood by her project, calling the University.s statement .ultimately inaccurate..

Klasky said Shvarts informed three senior Yale officials today . including two deans . that she neither impregnated herself nor induced any miscarriages. Rather, the entire episode, including a press release describing the exhibition, was .performance art,. Klasky said.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art,. Klasky said. .Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns..

But Shvarts reiterated Thursday that she repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding, she said. She said she does not know whether or not she was ever pregnant.

"An American artist claims to have repeatedly self-impregnated and self-aborted for her senior year project. Why does this feel like old hat?

April 24, 2008 5:00 PM

The art student Aliza Shvarts has caused controversy in the United States with her performance art piece in which she artificially inseminated herself repeatedly and then self-aborted. It is still unclear whether the performance actually happened, but in these media-saturated days it doesn't really matter. True or not, the result is a hot press topic and Shvarts has been re-christened the Abortion Girl.

Naturally the act (if it happened at all) has upset a vast section of the American right, and no doubt it was Shvart's intention to highlight a woman's right to choose what she does with her body. But what really seems to be getting the goat of the American public is its assumption of a cynical publicity stunt on the part of the artist.

Let's remember that Shvarts is just one in a long line of performance artists who have used their bodies to reach out to an anaesthetised and alienated society: one so inured from the shoot-from-the-hip tragedies on the evening news that it takes a willful, self-inflicted act to make us sit up.

The only difference between these artists and Shvarts is today's publicity machine. The artists of the 1970s rarely made the headlines, but when they did there was never a question of cynicism attached. By the 1980s, thanks to a few gallery owners, their media-hungry clients and some canny marketing gurus, the artist became a star and consequently very rich, and since that time a disproportionate attention to hype has dogged the political artist. We now have the dilettante Sebastian Horsley travelling to the Philippines to have himself crucified or the slack-faced David Blane shut up in a glass box in the name of art.

So what should we make of Shvarts? Art tart or savage political artist? It doesn't really matter. Her work is terrifying territory for so many reasons that it cannot fail to make an impact. It is not about Neo-cons or Christianity: it is about the body, the self and our disconnection from reality. For this reason it is art."

The Western Round Table on Modern Art met in San Francisco, April 8, 9 and 10, 1949.http://www.ubu.com/historical/wrtma/index.htmlThe object of the Round Table was to bring a representation of the best informed opinion of the time to bear on questions about art today (1949). A set of neat conclusions, as to the outcome of the conference, was neither expected nor desired. Rather, it was hoped that progress would be made in the exposure of hidden assumptions, in the uprooting of obsolete ideas, and in the framing of new questions.

....

All sessions were transcribed by two court reporters and also recorded on wire. Conference time totaled nine hours. The typed transcript was then corrected and approved by each contributor.

The single greatest frustration about this show is that almost all these open books are in vitrines, and you can see only one spread. Most of what each artist has done, all that colourful invention, is lost to you, behind closed pages. Luckily, Watson gives me a way out. “Well, a good half of the artists' books displayed in this show are owned by the Victoria and Albert Museum. And if you go up to the library you can ask to see them.”

Blood on Paper: The Art of the Book is at the V&A Museum, London SW7 (020-7942 2000; www.vam.ac.uk), from today

"Another interesting book-thingy in this section is by Francis Bacon. We see the contents of an old suitcase, full of stuff that would have been kicking around his studio - photos, sketches, smeary rags, etc. The piece is called Detritus. These are not the real things though. They are exact reproductions."

23 April, 2008

Creativity is increasingly recognised and celebrated for its contribution to cultural development, economic growth and social harmony; but it's also intrinsically good. We value our artists, film-makers, designers, authors, playwrights and performers because they entertain us, challenge us and inspire us.

Australian cultural endeavour feeds the roots of our creativity; it helps preserve and protect the storehouses of the nation's memory; it supports and sustains our disadvantaged and marginalised communities; and it shapes and defines our shared national identity.

Australian culture, in all its various forms and guises, is interwoven with the philosophy and the spirit of our nation, it is at the heart of who we are and is integral to the way we see ourselves and how others see us. Through film, writing and performance we try to define our unique experience, tell our own stories in our own voices and make our mark on the world.

The remarkable growth of the commercial Indigenous arts sector is indicative of the powerful transformative force of culture and the arts - growth which is rooted in tradition, land and language but which looks to the future. For many remote communities the development of a cultural enterprise has resulted in better health, educational and social outcomes.

Creativity will play a critical role in building and shaping Australia's economy. Our artists and designers are amongst the best in the world and have the capacity to lead the charge into the new, technology-rich emerging industries. A future Australian economy will be driven by our ideas and our creativity, by smart design and canny management of our intellectual property.Creative activity is also a fundamental part of our individual education. The arts can be provocative and subversive, challenging us to question the status quo. Through creative endeavours we learn to accept ambiguity, to move forward after failure, to think beyond preconceived boundaries and to communicate our emotions.

Background paper

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If you have any problems accessing these documents or the information they contain please contact the Secretariat via the toll free number for further assistance.

An exhibition of priceless illuminated manuscripts running at Melbourne's State Library of Victoria until June recalls the first information explosion. Adam Shand takes us to "Medieval Imagination " , a free exhibition, that takes visitors back to the Middle Ages, a time before printing, when it was possible to have read every book in existence.

17 April, 2008

Discover Eastern Europe’s art scene with spike Art Guide, made in cooperation with the artists living in the respective countries. The guide is divided into three sections: an essay about the development of the scene, a selection of artists and comprehensive tips for the art traveller.

The Prada Foundation is pleased to announce its next exhibition, dedicated to the Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg (Lysekil, Sweden, 1978), to be held at the Prada Foundation at Via Fogazzaro 36, Milan, from April 19th until 1st June 2008.

The project, which has been specifically designed for the exhibiting space of Fondazione Prada, consists of models that remind of parts of human body and hint at universal symbols. These models become pavilions inside which the videos of the renowned Swedish artist are projected representing visceral compelling desires and possessive sexual thoughts.

Djurberg’s videos are short animations made using Stop Motion techniques where small plasticine figures create surreal atmospheres and, often, grotesque stories. The staging of these stories is rudimentary but ingenious, infusing an ambiguous sense of anxiety and unease through their sexual reflections, with references to violence, the macabre, gruesome, and subtle pleasure of crueltyand perversion.

Djurberg’s works are characterised by an obsessive rhythm, permeated by a taste for the ironic and the humorous, conveying a sense of anxiety and nostalgia, along with unease and sometimes even profound anguish. It’s a sensation that is re-enforced throughout all her work by accompanying music, composed by the Swedish composer, Hans Berg.

Nathalie Djurberg lives and works in Berlin; she is one of the leading new generation Swedish artists, strongly active on the international scene. She has participated to the last edition of Performa in New York ( 2007); she has presented solo shows at Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna (2007) and at Färgfabriken in Stockholm (2006); her videos have been shown at Tate Britain in London (2007), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York (2006) and at the 4th Biennial of Contemporary Art in Berlin (2006)

The exhibition will be accompanied by a book written by Germano Celant and published by Progetto Prada Arte.

15 April, 2008

KultureFlash is a free, weekly newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London. Each week we track down some of the more unusual and interesting events taking place in the capital and deliver them straight to your inbox. Featuring art, gigs, films, talks, clubs and more -- we are committed to bringing you an eclectic mix of the most stimulating events in London.

If you want to tell us about an upcoming event please do so by sending an email to: events@kultureflash.net. We receive many emails and thus please realise that sadly we cannot reply to all of them. Every single email receives attention and we will contact you if we need anything further. Please note that KultureFlash is not a listings ezine and we do not receive any payment from venues, artists, managers or promoters.

Please send all press releases, invites, books and CDs to:

KultureFlash Ltd.52 Cranmer CourtWhitehead's GroveLondon SW3 3HW

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Resident Artist Archive

KultureFlash's monthly Artist-in-Residence programme began in Issue #7. Below is the full complement of the artists we've had the pleasure of exhibiting since then.

Woodblock printing has a long and distinguished history in China, where printing was invented about 1500 years ago. The exhibition shows how contemporary artists have engaged with a traditional art form to produce exciting and beautiful subject-matter.The 108 prints selected for the exhibition are by 90 artists. Artists in their 20s contrast with an older generation, who lived through the political upheavals of 20th-century China. Each artist responds creatively to the expressive potential of the woodcut.

The British Library has mounted Chinese Printmaking Today in collaboration with the Muban Foundation (‘muban’ means ‘woodblock’). It was founded in 1997 by Christer von der Burg and the late Verena Bolinder. The Foundation works to revitalise printmaking in China and to raise the profile of woodblock artists in the West.

Animations/fictions presents curatorial research over a group of works from the Fonds National d'Art Contemporain that have been consigned to the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest. The exhibition spotlights different ways in which comic strips and cartoons have been used by French and international contemporary artists.

Its guiding principle is how cartoons have appeared in citational form and using different approaches: initially in the Pop Art style before becoming, at a later stage (1990s-2005) and in a context removed from animation, an explicit source of inspiration. The featured artists express highly sophisticated concepts in an easily understandable language. By refering to contemporary concepts into images, borrowing childhood iconography, or creating images inspired by Walt Disney or mangas, beyond their connotations of an all-pervasive subculture, mass culture and media in today's globalised world, all these images remain powerful vectors for sometimes dramatic events. They reveal an adult awareness of the gravity of the present day through a child's wide-eyed gaze.

This selection of works, all very different in their form and message, also highlights how contemporary figuration draws on its close ties with the various genres of popular culture, switching it towards a different area.

The exhibition is being shown to the Romanian public at the MNAC from January to end of August 2008. Other events (talks) are also being staged at the MNAC or at the Institut Français in Bucharest, which is also hosting a programme of residencies for French artists in 2008.

For the first time, the Vancouver Art Gallery will bring the worlds of anime, comics, cartoons, video games, manga, graphic novels and contemporary art together in one exhibition. Offering an innovative and dynamic survey, KRAZY! The Delirious World of Anime + Comics + Video Games + Art reveals the uniqueness of each medium, while uncovering their histories, interrelations and future trajectories. On view from May 17 to September 7, 2008, the exhibition is co-curated by some of the art forms’ most influential artists and cultural producers, including Pulitzer Prize-winning author Art Spiegelman, The Sims video game creator Will Wright, comic artist Seth and DreamWorks animated feature film director Tim Johnson. Conceived and developed by Vancouver Art Gallery senior curator Bruce Grenville, the exhibition will travel to a New York City arts institution in March 2009.

“The Vancouver Art Gallery is committed to furthering new and dynamic representations of visual culture,” said Kathleen Bartels, director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “With the exhibition KRAZY!, we have created a tremendous opportunity to present some of the most highly engaging and relevant art forms of our time.”

One of the largest exhibitions ever organized by the Gallery, KRAZY! will occupy two floors of gallery space and is designed in collaboration with Tokyo-based architectural firm Atelier Bow-Wow—a design team renowned for their understanding of informal culture and ability to enhance communal visual experiences. Divided into seven sections defined by medium, the exhibition takes viewers through ever-changing gallery environments, including a mini-theatre for viewing animated cartoons and anime, immersive video spaces and innovative reading environments for visitors to experience a deluge of manga, graphic novels and comics. The exhibition comprises more than 600 artworks, including original sketches, concept drawings, sketchbooks, storyboards, production drawings, films, video games, animation cels, three dimensional models, sculptures, books, manga and much more.

The artists and works in the exhibition were selected by a group of co-curators, including Bruce Grenville, the exhibition’s coordinating curator and curator of the visual arts section; Tim Johnson, curator of animated cartoons; Kiyoshi Kusumi, curator of manga and anime; Seth, curator of comics and graphic novels; Art Spiegelman, curator of comics and graphic novels; Toshiya Ueno, curator of manga and anime; and Will Wright, curator of video games. To give the overall selection historical context, curators selected precursors in their respective fields, artists who had established their given genres and artists who are leading the way to the future.

KRAZY! is a rare opportunity to see artworks that have shaped the history of contemporary visual culture, including Art Spiegelman’s drawings for the first three-page version of his Pulitzer prize-winning Maus; George Herriman’s last three drawings for Krazy Kat; Lotte Reiniger’s 1927 The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the first feature-length animated cartoon; a sneak preview of Will Wright’s groundbreaking video game Spore; and an extraordinary selection of drawings from Yuichi Yokoyama’s latest manga, New Engineering. The exhibition also includes works by Moyoco Anno, Lynda Barry, Marcel Broodthaers, Chester Brown, Milt Gross, Pierre Huyghe, Ichiro Itano, Tim Johnson, Yoko Kanno, Harvey Kurtzman, John Lasseter, Roy Lichtenstein, Christian Marclay, Winsor McCay, Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto, Mamoru Nagano, Claes Oldenburg, Mamoru Oshii, Nick Park, Raymond Pettibon, Seth, Iwatani Toru, Chris Ware, among others.

The American Scene features around 150 outstanding prints by 74 leading modern American artists, including George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Grant Wood, Josef Albers, Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois and Jackson Pollock.

The first half of the 20th century was a period of great change in America, and this exhibition examines American society and culture through the prints produced by some of the most important artists of the time.

The exhibition begins with John Sloan's Ashcan School etchings of everyday urban experience in the 1900s and concludes with Jackson Pollock and the triumph of abstract expressionism in the 1950s.

Many of the images in the intervening period explore the changing urban landscape of New York, the onset of the Depression, the romanticised visions of the American heartlands by the Regionalists, the response to the rise of Fascism in Europe and America’s entry into the Second World War.

All the works come from the British Museum’s own American print collection, which is the most comprehensive outside the United States covering this period.

Dear blakkbyrd,Just a quick note to say hi & let you know I have a solo exhibition happening at The Art Traders.

It's called Welcome to my Neighbourhood.

'Inspired by the local characters in her neighbourhood – Darlinghurst – Wendy Murray introduces her vision of the people and places which define her ‘hood, with a freshness and sweetness, not often associated with grunge, grime and anonymity of the inner city' - Fiona McIntosh, The Art Traders

The show includes all original artwork, including silkscreen works and delicate cast-plaster compositions.

The show runs until 26 April 2008 - still plenty of time to check it out!

Over the past few months I have completed several independent art projects, commissions and workshops, including a stencil art workshop at the MCA.http://www.mca.com.au/

I have also collaborated with many folks including Daisy Linhares of LA based Bread and Butter, The Darlo Bar, Little Joe by Gail Elliott, Lisa Ho, LOVE#3 Cafe and David Jones. Check out some of these projects & more atwww.wendymurray.com.au

Wendy Murray is a Sydney based artist whose work tends to large scale mural projects, both private and public. At times working under her pseudonym Mini Graff, Wendy’s street art challenges typical perceptions of graffiti art. She stencils and paints images on to a variety of media (walls, boards, wallpaper, rarely canvas) which strongly relate to the given environment and community, transforming an anonymous repetitive urban landscape into a unique and personal aesthetic experience. She works with local identities/ characters, artists, musicians and businesses to create each unique project.

Recent major commissions include art murals in David Jones’ leading stores in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane; a recently opened café in Camperdown; private commission for a home on the lower north shore of Sydney and Maitland Regional Art Gallery in 2006.

Printed Matter, Inc. is pleased to announce an exhibition featuring the work of fierce pussy, a collective comprised of a group of queer women committed to creating public art and performing direct action around issues of lesbian identity and visibility. The opening reception and book launch for fierce pussy will take place on Saturday, April 5, 2008 from 5 â€“ 7 PM. Printed Matter is located at 195 Tenth Avenue (between 21st and 22nd Street).

Active in New York City from 1991 to 1995, fierce pussy was composed of a fluid and often-shifting cadre of dykes. Core members included Pam Brandt, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Alison Froling, Zoe Leonard, Suzanne Wright, and Carrie Yamaoka. Adamantly low-tech, fast and low-budget, fierce pussy relied on modest resources: old typewriters, found photographs, their own baby pictures, and whatever material they could get donated. Much of the work was produced using the equipment at their day jobs. Emerging during a decade steeped in the AIDS crisis, activism, and queer identity politics, fierce pussy brought lesbian identity directly out into the streets in a manner characterized by the urgency of those years.

fierce pussy wheatpasted their posters and printed and distributed stickers and t-shirts throughout the city. Their other projects included re-designing the bathroom at the Gay and Lesbian Center, a greeting card campaign directed against the policies of Cardinal Oâ€™Connor and Senator Dâ€™Amato, and a moving billboard/truck. For Gay Pride 1991, fierce pussy re-named streets along the parade route after prominent lesbian heroines using stenciled and spray-painted street signs.

The exhibition will feature a survey of fierce pussy's posters as well as stickers and postcards. Also included is archival material such as photo documentation and newspaper articles as well as source materials and original artwork for the collective's campaigns.

Saturdayâ€™s event will also serve as the launch for fierce pussy, a self-titled book of posters published by Printed Matter and fierce pussy in conjunction with the exhibition. The publication reproduces 16 classic posters from fierce pussy in an over-sized format with spiral binding, such that the reader can tear out a poster and install it wherever she wishes. fierce pussy encourages the dissemination of its posters worldwide.

The exhibition announcement is a remix of one of the collectiveâ€™s earlier posters. A postcard edition of this poster was made especially for the exhibition and the collectiveâ€™s much-coveted fierce pussy toilet paper has been re-editioned as well.

The poster book, postcards, and toilet paper edition are available at www.printedmatter.org and at our storefront in New York City.

09 April, 2008

The show presents early works, gunpowder darwings, explosion events, installations, and social projects. Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe features more than 80 works from the 1980s to the present.

The exhibition has been designed as a site-specific presentation within Fank Lloyd Wright’s rotunda building and also in galleries of the Annex. According to the artist, the presentation fills the museum with the energy of an explosion.

Eight of Cai Guo-Qiang’s most important installations are on display, the most dominating one being “Inopportune: Stage One (2004)”, comprised of nine cars pierced with blinking light tubes that simulate the trajectory of a car-bomb explosion tumbling upwards through the atrium’s void.

Axis has teamed up with students from Kingston University’s MA in Curating Contemporary Design and four professionals in the field of digital art to explore the challenges and opportunities posed by curating digital today.

Drawing on the wide and diverse expertise of the students and guest contributors, this forum will generate debate and discussion on new challenges, current approaches and questions raised by the ever-changing and expanding medium of the digital.

08 April, 2008

Artists intervenePolitically committed poster art from Picasso to the present day

from the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg

Käthe Kollwitz Museum KölnTwo world wars and the propaganda posters of the former Eastern Bloc countries have shown that posters are an ideal medium of political debate. Present-day election campaigns also regularly illustrate this fact. It is probably less well-known that in the course of the 20th century artists have also learnt to exploit this medium – rarely, however, for propaganda purposes, but rather to “intervene” actively, to give effective expression to their views.

After the First World War Expressionist artists such as Schmitt-Rottluff and Pechstein designed election posters summoning voters in the young Weimar Republic. Käthe Kollwitz actively supported peace and social causes, but, in the final analysis, these were to remain isolated cases. In1949/50 Picasso reached an international public with his doves of peace, which was was the signal for numerous artists to use posters to give expression to their political views.

This exhibition will present different individual perceptions of the history of the last 50 years and will confront visitors with unexpected issues and exhortations to political action.

Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century.

In 1933, after the establishment of the National-Socialist regime, the Nazi Party authorities forced her to resign her place on the faculty of the Akademie der Künste. Her work was removed from museums. Although she was banned from exhibiting, some of her work was used by the Nazis for propaganda.

Working now in a smaller studio, in the mid 1930s she completed her last major cycle of lithographs, Death, which consisted of eight stones: Woman Welcoming Death, Death with Girl in Lap, Death Reaches for a Group of Children, Death Struggles with a Woman, Death on the Highway, Death as a Friend, Death in the Water, and The Call of Death.

In July of 1936 she and her husband were visited by the Gestapo, who threatened her with arrest and deportation to a concentration camp; they resolved to commit suicide if such a prospect became inevitable.[26] However, Kollwitz was by now a figure of international note, and no further actions were taken. On her seventieth birthday she "received over one hundred and fifty telegrams from leading personalities of the art world", as well as offers to house her in the United States, which she declined for fear of provoking reprisals against her family.[27]

She survived her husband (who died in 1940 from an illness), and her grandson, Peter (the son of her oldest son Hans), who died in action during World War II (in 1942).

She evacuated Berlin in 1943. Later that year her house was bombed, and many drawings, prints, and documents were lost. She moved first to Nordhausen, then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where she lived her final months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony.[28] Kollwitz died just before the end of the war.

Kollwitz made a total of 275 prints, in etching, woodcut and lithography. Virtually the only portraits she made during her life were images of herself, of which there are at least fifty. These self-portraits constitute a life-long honest self-appraisal; "they are psychological milestones".[29]

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i went to cologne to see this museum, now its online, take the tour, - if you are a printmaker visiting europe dont miss this.